Trader Dealer. Traders Profit With Computers Set at High Speed. The Matrix, but with money: the world of high-speed trading - Ars Technica. It sounds like something out of The Matrix: a giant, world-spanning electronic network where high-powered machines, some of them using GPUs to gain a speed advantage, run secret, rapidly-evolving software algorithms that battle it out for profits in a high-stakes game of cat-and-mouse, attack-counterattack, that yields some $21 billion a year for the winners and can spell ruin for the losers.
Except that it's not The Matrix—it's the stock and commodities markets, and the fact that these markets mainly consist now of computers trading against one another has been brought closer to the public's attention by last month's alleged theft of Goldman Sachs' proprietary trading code. Press reports of trading days that end with big gains or losses are typically accompanied by shots of a trading floor where young traders are either euphorically throwing papers into the air (up days) or staring dejectedly at a stock ticker with hand pressed to forehead, shoulders slumped in defeat (down days).